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Would You Bid for a Job?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Several U.S. hospitals have found an innovative way to deal with nursing shortage. They post shift openings and the highest hourly rate they're willing to pay on their internal networks. Then, the nurses bid online for these extra shifts. The lowest bidders get the shifts and are notified by e-mail. This bidding process is almost certainly a good thing for the hospitals, but is it good for the nurses? Or safe for you? And what will happen if other industries also adopt auction systems? Imagine a company telling you, "Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software? Name your price, and you'll make some more cash." What do you think of this bidding process? Read more before posting your comments."
Scam! Yeah like I'm going to pay you to hire me or provide me with extra work if I'm employed with you. That is exactly what low-bid hiring amounts to -- corporate kickbacks. This is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard of and I hope all the companies involved get exactly what they have coming to them -- loads and loads of malpractice suits. That's about as much as they'll get from hiring low-bidders. The job market is tough enough on job hunters to have to undercut your own salary in order to have an advantage in job hunting. Many employees take back from the company in order to offset low enough salaries! If the rest of the job market decides to follow suit, this could be a catastrophe.
Why don't they have online queues for hospital waiting rooms? That's because they *want* you to bleed out in the Emergency room so that the hospital can help ensure they get better funding, or at least that's the way it is in Canada. They spend all kinds of money on eShift to get it running and all the nurses buy into it because they are either too tired to realize they're being screwed by the system, or they have no choice. *sigh*
This reminds me of some shady business practices in the petroleum industry. Once a project I was bidding on went to the competition because we refused to kickback a large diamond to the guy in charge of purchasing for this huge company. Yes, he wanted a diamond. Not sure why but I'm guessing he was going to tie a fob to it and use it for office-oriented bling-bling. Either that or he wanted to cut a safe open...
eShift == eShit
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
are the bids silent/undisclosed, so that noone knows what the current bid is?
Nurses are unique creatures in that they require a four year education and above-average intelligence, but are managed like factory workers. It won't take long for peers to figure out who the low bidders are and to educate them as to the protocol to be followed, i.e. a minimum bid.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
This most certainly is an innovative solution for determining the "fair value" of work... but it seems quite dangerous for a hospital to be trying it out. What happens if a shift gets left on the board with nobody willing to bid under the max posted?
This kind of system is great to use when there's more labor supply than demand, but seems dangerously close to a colapse should the staff decide they want to cause a problem... no need to give two weeks notice or even to quit, just refuse to bid on the designated day and therefore nobody will be assigned to work that day.
Having an unmanned checkout at Wal-Mart is one thing, having not enough nurses to cover all of the patients in a hospital is quite another.
If the nurses don't want to be exploited even more they better make sure there will be no bids.
This is almost like slavery -
Back then, people were made slaves without any choice in the matter. Now it's almost like being forced into one, because of economics.
This is so wrong.
We keep playing the game like it's an open system, and it never was, and now we are quickly discovering the end stops.
Designing an economic model which awards wealth to those who grow, is doomed when a company, any company reaches market saturation.
The American economy no longer exists, American business is multinational, global, and not limited to our borders. It finds cheap labor and brings the saving in production back to the U.S. where American consumers rejoice at the low cost of service and goods. Sadly it's all a sham. It's as unsustainable as a constant diet of junk food. It tastes good while you're eating it, but it's slowly killing you. It's all take and no give, the dollars fly out of the country faster and faster, until the nations fundamental wealth is gone, and the citizens of the nation notice they are now the collective bag holders.
* Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure. * Money that leaves undermines U.S. labor, costing jobs and quality of living. * The growing gap between haves and have nots in the U.S. suggest a growing economic instability. Loss of jobs starting with manufacturing, but now quickly moving up through intellectual "white collar" professions, points to a growing joblessness with no end in sight. As the government services fail (and if you haven't been reading the paper or watching the news at 11:00, local government everywhere in this country is on the verge of collapse), the means to manage and provide basic life needs to the growing disenfranchised evaporates. The middle class vanishes. We are all reduced to the same level of living enjoyed by billions of starving people all over the world. Already 3% of our population owns 75% of the wealth, this is the greatest desparity in wealth in our history. And still the insanity accelerates. This is just the beginning ladies and gentlemen. What will you do, when your kids fresh out of college, with hundred thousand dollar college loans to pay, can't find work. What will you do, when you haven't received a raise in 4 years, and the boss says "Sorry, the work is heading to China."
I've personally spent the last 6 months looking for work, I've had my resume tuned, I have 25 years of technical experience, and I've made it clear I'll do almost anything, and I have not had a single interview. I'm not alone, I have a couple hundred friends and acquaintances who've been unemployed for between 2 and 3.5 years.
I keep hearing neocons mouthing the lines of Scrooge from a Christmas Carol... "the surplus population shold just get on with the business of dying...", or some variation of that. It's not bad yet. It may well get there. If it does, our government, is going to have a very bad time. Our society is going to have a very bad time. We need to begin addressing sustainable business practice from an economic, environmental, and ethics based context. To simply let the train go where it will is to insure a crash none of us will walk away from.
bw
It doesn't seem that the nurses are "paying" for the extra hours, but more like bidding a lower price for their labours - I suppose in the same vain that contractors bid for government contracts*. A little difference, but a difference nontheless.
*Of course, this only isolates the lowest bidder, not the person/entity best suited for the job, a major flaw in this system that I see. Of course, all of the bidding nurses are employees already, and this shouldn't affect the quality of care.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Isn't that basically market forces at work?
IMHO probably; doesn't make it right or wrong- it may well work better than a fixed price though. But it's going to be vulnerable to all the normal market problems.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Actually, graveyard is prefered by many. My mom hates daytime shifts- she doesn't have to deal with doctors at night.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Anyone who knows his/her quality of work will seldom undersell. If I charge more, it's probably because my quality of work speaks for it.
By making people bid, they are literally making them demean themselves - and those that offer their services low are probably not going to be the better ones.
Ofcourse, this will make others bring down their rates too, and everyone loses -- well, everyone except the top management who make a shitload of money at the expense of their employees.
This is just wrong and absolutely disgusting. I'm a PERSON - not a thing. My services will be charged what I feel are appropriate, and not being forced to BID like a slave. Sheesh.
I especially don't see how this is a problem as it appears to be a "who wants to work overtime for the lowest amount of money" contest. How bad do you want the extra money? Maybe applicant number 1 needs a new car and will do it for 30 bucks an hour but applicant number 2 has 4 kids at home and his wife just got laid off so he will do it for 25.
Next thing you know companies will just ask, "Ok, before we hire you we need your salary requirements and the salary requirements of 4 of your peers."...Just like Progressive car insurance.
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I dare to stand against the prevailing mythos of anti-corporatism and say that this is an economically efficient solution for nurses who want overtime and hospitals who are often in financial distress, not to mention keeping all of our health care costs lower.
...how this is any different from the way things work now:
"Imagine a company telling you, 'Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software? Name your price, and you'll make some more cash.'"
I live in a state with at-will employment. In EVERY single interview I've ever had, the interviewing company has asked me what salary I wanted. They know how much they're willing to pay, and my answer to that question will pretty much always be a bid - if I name too high of a price, I generally don't get a call back. If it's low, they're more interested (or suspicious if it's too low).
Of course, this bidding process exactly how it works with a contract company; the client asks me to do something and wants to know how much it costs.
As I understand, this nurse bidding process is for extra shifts; you're already getting paid for a normal job and they have an extra shift. The person willing to work it for the least is going to get it.
You asshat's didn't read that this is only for picking up extras.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
There is a critical shortage of nurses. In most cases, nurses going through this system would end up making more money. In this case, the lowest bid would be the least highest bid.
This just lets the poor lady who works nights get a little more compensation relative to her peers...why not?
As for you being a "person"...well, don't get too involved in being very sick in the US, you will find out quickly it is a business, and yes they basically will let you die in favor of a better funded or insured patient. If you have HMO, they must clear every procedure. This means your treatment is waiting on a claims agent who dropped out of high school in Alabama. Don't think people haven't died while waiting on treatment clearance.
This is a perfect example of how the free market system fails the working class.
If there is a shortage of nursing staff the solution should be to raise the incentive to be a nurse. That incentive is pay and benefits. If the industry needs more nurses it either needs to fragment the job description so that the qualified nurses can concentrate on skilled tasks while orderlies and candy stripers handle lesser tasks OR it needs to make nursing a more attractive profession.
Instead, somehow, they have managed to convince the employees to sign on to this overtime for less plan that deprives the working class of its free time and in fact devalues it. Eventually these people will ahev to pick between overtime at the hospital or part time work at Taco Bell.
Just to review...in a free market economy a scarce commodity should be worth more. This is an example of the system breaking where a scarce commodity is being devalued, thereby reducing anyone's desire to be a nurse.
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Which side are you on?
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?
Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
or will you be a man?
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on boys?
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Don't scab for the bosses
Don't listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
unless we organize.
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?"
If you were going to stay a hospital for a few days for a surgery or illness, Would you rather have a nurse that values her skills at $10/hour or one that thinks she is worth $50/hour. Also, a nurse that works for less will put in longer hours to maintain the same standard of living. She is more likely to be tired and overworked.
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Maybe a good adjunct to this practice would be an online list of hospitals, etc. that are using this practice so potential patients are informed. I'm guessing they'd want to know this just like they'd like to know that the airliner they might be flying on is built with the cheapest possible parts and labor and maintained by the cheapest possible engineers.
Where did these people go to business school? I thought it was standard practice to bribe congress to declare a health industry emergency, and get them to work for unpaid overtime.
That's what you do for the middle to high end of the middle class. You only auction off low-paying jobs (after lobbying congress to loophole away minimum wage for auctioned wages, of course).
Like most HR issues (think the overtime law changes) people dont understand them and jump to wild conclusions when they hear about them.
The problem with nursing is that in most regions there are significant *shortages*. Staffing at many hospitals is a problem, recruiting nurses is a problem.
This is a way for the nurses to in essence set their own schedules (as opposed to the hospitals mandating certain hours) and to make their own tradeoffs on $$$ vs shift etc.
From what I have heard (Ive got lots of family in the medical field) most nurses *love* this system vs the previous systems.
Would you rather be cared for by a nurse who was considered good enough to have a steady job at the hospital and just wanted to pick up a extra shift here or there? Or perhaps you'd rather be cared for by someone from a temp agency, who has never before been vetted by the hospital, and doesn't care all that much because they may never work there again.
"This bidding process is almost certainly a good thing for the hospitals, but is it good for the nurses?"
Unless you do more than wave hands, yes. They get extra income for doing what they're trained for.
"Or safe for you?"
Why not. It's not like a nurse will be doing a job for which they're untrained.
"And what will happen if other industries also adopt auction systems?"
Software already does. It's called asking for hourly rate. Same for plumbers, carpenters, lawyers, accountants, etc. Pretty pandemic, if you ask me.
"Imagine a company telling you, 'Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software? Name your price, and you'll make some more cash.'"
I don't have to, because that doesn't make sense. Nurses aren't being asked to do something they aren't trained for, why pretend that's the case?
"What do you think of this bidding process?"
Reasonable, what rational reasons would you have against it?
If there's a nursing shortage, why would the nurses, who obviously are in demand, be the ones doing the bidding? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Are we dealing with the bizarro world here?
Where the median wait for radiation therapy is 6 weeks and people regularly give up waiting years for replacement hips or other major care and so fly to the USA to pay for it themselves?
That sort of health care?
Clear, Dark Skies
The article says the unions are irate and doing everything they can to stop it. Giving Nurses the ability to set their own wages totally destroys the union power base. Even if the bidding resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of life of the nurses, the union would oppose it.
Direct employee/employer negotiations destroys the illusion that the manna comes from the union.
BTW, why is there an automatic assumption that bidding mechanisms will lower wages? This product is being released in a nursing shortage. As such, I would think a bidding mechanism would dramatically increase wages.
IMHO, one of the biggest problems with the employment arrangement is that workers only get to negotiate their wage once...at hiring time when they are least in the position to negotiate. A bidding process creates a continuous feedback mechanism that will keep wages better in line with market forces.
For those in the Technology sector, lets all collectively agree right now
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Bidding is fine except for one thing: it shifts power to the employer. You can always find some desperate yet competent person to do a job. A good example of people in these categories are newly graduated students, immigrants with huge debts/penalties to pay or people with lower cost of living (eg. in rural areas in other states/provinces). These people will always undercut others (of course, I am assuming the job can be done by them--which is true for the vast majority of tech jobs (only a small percentage are senior, architect/designer/etc jobs requiring experience). Now, if you enter a bidding proces and are undercut then that will make you look badly to the employer. The employer might at some point ask 'why shouldn't I do everything through the bidding process?'.
The root problem is that the employer is a large aggregate body while the employee is just a small ant. This is the key reason for having unions in the first place. You don't have unions in the tech industry because the salaries are high enough that employees aren't being marginalized (i.e. employees actually have a lot of power, relative to most jobs).
Having said this, bidding for jobs in already here and will simply spread. It is inevitable! Business contracts (not talking about job contracts) are generally won through some bidding process. Therefore, it wouldn't be unusual to have job contracts also won through bidding. Already employees in certain industries work by bidding all the time (an example is artists and the art industry in general).
I think the key change that will occur as bidding gains prominence is that salary will matter more than "skill" in the future. Right now, "skills" are what get you hired but I imagine salary will start to play a major role under bidding (since modern capitalist bidding is all based on price; no way to quantify skills). This is not to say that someone who can't do the job will be hired but that the difference between getting hte job and not getting it will depend far more on the salary than now...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Really, auctions are already the current system for most jobs. Just because we don't think in terms of auctions doesn't mean we're not doing it. It's just not an auction with instant feedback.
There may not be an auctioneer but it's still the same market mechanism at work. You might not think you're competing against other workers, but you really are.
But don't look so glum! Price isn't the only thing labor consumers (employers) care about. If all other things are equal, then the person willing to work for the lowest wage will get hired. Fortunately for us all other things are NOT equal.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If I'm laid out bleeding to death, I'll take the quick.
In all other cases, I'll take quality.
In no circumstance will I ever want my healthcare to be delivered as cheap'n'nasty as possible.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Loss of jobs starting with manufacturing, but now quickly moving up through intellectual "white collar" professions, points to a growing joblessness with no end in sight.
The loss of US manufacturing jobs essentially started in the '70's and finished in the '80's. You might as well be wringing your hands about the "loss of jobs" in agriculture in the 1940's. Guess what: those manufacturing workers haven't just been sitting around unemployed for 20 years. They have gotten into different careers, relocating if need be.
To put things in perspective, the recent tech downturn is MUCH smaller in its impact on employment than were the end of manufacturing and agriculture. Both of those fields shed 10's of percentages of the country's total population in employees in just a few short decades, and yet the 20th century in America was hardly one of starvation and rampant joblessness. The move from agriculture to manufacturing, and from manufacturing to services, were profound shifts in the nation's output. What has happened in tech, on the other hand, is kind of a sidenote. It's comparable in scope to what happened on Wall Street in the '80's. In both '90's tech and '80's Wall Street, a media-propelled hoard of prospectors crowded into a field that was perceived as "lucrative", creating a glut of workers for relatively specialized fields. This glut, coupled with an eventual market down-cycle, made the field less lucrative than many had hoped, and lots of people lost their jobs. But guess what: both the computer industry and finance have carried on, and just as the world isn't crowded with unemployed bond traders who lost their jobs in 1988, I strongly doubt 2020 will see us with a surfeit of unemployed web developers who just never found anything else to do.
You know, this method could be useful in an on-call situation that traditionally has rotating shifts (like systems administration).
I personally detest being on call and would much rather avoid it. If instead of having everyone participate and having it (supposedly) built into your salary, having the people who don't mind (or even like) being on-call, or need the extra money, can bid for it. Those who don't want to be on-call can just not bid, or bid really high.
Of course, unless a max bid is set, companies wouldn't go for this, because it virtually guarantees they would have to pay more than in the current system.
If there truly is a nursing shortage, then shouldn't the nurses be putting themselves up for bid? If there are more positions available than there are qualified persons to fill those positions, then the nurses should be posting a *minimum* rate for which they'd work, and the competing hospitals could bid up from there.
Either the nursing shortage doesn't exist, which goes against what I've been reading in the news for at least several years, or this is some scam to bring in more less-qualified nurses and push out the more experienced (and therefore more expensive) ones.
Boards of Directors being what they are, I'm guessing the latter. These are two hospitals I would not want to wind up at after an accident.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
First of all, if you're at a university, nursing students are going to look very good compared to most other students due to the fact that they're part of the minority not majoring in bullshit. (As opposed to, say, political science students.)
However, nurses can be and historically often have been trained on the job. Most women are well-suited to it and will do fine as long as they're competently supervised by experienced nurses and doctors.
As it stands, although there are university degrees in nursing to be had, one can enter the field instead by taking a 2-year course with no academic entry requirements other than a highschool diploma.
Even this exists, I believe, due to factors not related to the importance of the knowledge gained:
1) existing nurses wish to put obstacles between the bulk of the labor pool and wage-lowering competition for their jobs, and
2) those who hire new nurses prefer someone who has already made a substantial, costly investment in getting to that point, so they're less likely to consume training time and then just quit at an unpredictable and inconvenient moment.
Artificially high educational barriers to employment which have little to do with actual capability to do the work are common today.
Anyway, I never said nurses are stupid. I said that nursing doesn't require high intelligence, and I stand by that.
I like and respect just about every nurse or nursing student I know personally; my purpose isn't to insult them. They do honest work, generally work very hard, and these days tend to be unusually practical long-term thinkers. But it's just not accurate to say that it's a job requiring above-average intelligence.
That was quite possible the scariest comment I have ever read on slashdot.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
That argument is crazy, if you don't mind my sayin'. An opportunistic hospital that charged emergency patients an exorbitant amount would find that, aside from those very emergency patients, it had no business. If I had been charged like that during a time when I was helpless, I know I'd go well out of my way to avoid ever paying them for anything in the future. And thus, the "invisible hand" of the market would force them out of business, leaving only the hospitals who don't use such shady practices. See? Nothing beyond free market necessary.
These kinda things only work when there are people willing to undercut the rest and think they can make a living that way. In a world where you gotta work with the people you undercut that might not be to enjoyable. Especially if you consider that there always is someone willing to work for less.
I also see another problem. The old army joke tells you to remember that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. Now your life is in the hands of the lowest bidder far more directly.
Nurses have a lot of power and responsibilty. Why do you think we keep hearing these stories about a nurse getting away for years killing 20+ patients?
All that the nurses need to do is to make sure no-one undercuts the organized bid. Good job america, you just invited the mafia into your hospitals.
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He's not talking about the procedure in an ER, he's talking about what happens when he's one of two ambulance crews first arriving at the site of a plane crash where there are 180 passengers, half apparently dead, and with 50 critically wounded.
You're damn right it's scary, but the scary part is the disaster that's already happened, not the cold calculus of triage. Spock would understand - the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.
If you're one of the walking wounded, go find some black-tagged person and give CPR if you are able.
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